Thursday, January 13, 2011

The Academic

Herald had learned to sleep during the day. He could go to the library, pretend to read a book, and doze off in a corner. For eight hours he stayed warm and safe from winter. Staff rarely kicked him out as long as he washed the grime from his hands and face to look more respectable. By night, he kept moving to stay warm and alive. He also visited the garbage bins at their fullest and freshest.. Food and clothes worth taking would be at the top of the pile and only slightly decayed. He often visited hospital bins, where doctors and nurses regularly disposed of old scrubs. Once clothed and fed, he wandered the streets, contemplating complex analysis, number theory, and the occasional topology problem.

Previously, as a respected mathematics professor, life had been so cyclical. He quoted facts to his students that his teachers had quoted to him, because their teachers had quoted to them, and his students would likely quote them to the next generation of students simply to continue the cycle. He rendered services to the university in exchange for money that kept him out of poverty so that he could render services to the university in exchange for money that kept him out of poverty.

Now, he lived on the cutting edge of survival. He stayed one step ahead of death through intelligence and grit. Best of all, he lived entirely for himself. No obligations, personal or professional, interfered with his desires. No distractions, once he satisfied his bodily needs, tugged at his thoughts. No cycles, no self sustaining, but purposeless systems. He existed only for the challenge that his mind and body presented.

Today, he broke that rule, for the hospital dumpster had presented its own challenge. Someone had hefted It in to the bin, where It made a large depression in the regular trash. Herald grasped It in both hands and lugged It out onto the snow, along with a shower of wrappers and used tissues. He had spent thirty four years of his life understanding patterns, yet could find no pattern in It. It slipped away from his understanding like a floating beach ball, rolling away as he tried to approach it.

Herald glanced around him with all the furtiveness of a rat. No one was in sight, but as he turned back to his find, he could not recall what It looked like, or even Its size. Entranced, he slipped It easily into a pocket and retreated to an alley he knew lay in the light of a street lamp. There, he crouched and studied It. As the hours ticked by, he turned it over again and again in his hands and mind. With every slight interruption, he would loose the tenuous certainty he had accumulated about It and had to start again.
Then, a thought rushed over him so fiercely, his stomach knotted and lifted to the point he could have used it as a bow tie.


I've dedicated my life to death. I have severed all ties that would make my passing matter to the world. Mathematics itself is the purest form of death, the passionless oblivion we fill with our own unprovable ideas. I am a wraith, and I wanted this.


Herbert wept, then slept, then met his fate in the cold of a winter night.

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